4 takeaways from John Brennan’s grilling

Bipartisan agreement isn’t common on Capitol Hill these days, but John Brennan brought senators together at his CIA director confirmation hearing — to express their anger at years of intelligence stonewalling from presidents of both parties.

Twelve years into the war on terror, a largely complacent Congress and its Senate Intelligence Committee finally seemed to have found its voice. Brennan had the misfortune of being the one on the other side of the table when they did.

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It seemed clear by the end of the session that Brennan had the support to be confirmed, but it was equally clear that senators are so angry with the Obama administration over questions of access to information about drone policies, Benghazi and other topics that the CIA nominee may have to wait for some of the questions to be sorted before being confirmed by the full Senate.

Here’s POLITICO’s top takeaways from Brennan’s grilling:

Senators were looking for a piñata

For hours, Brennan was battered by senators with long-standing grievances with the CIA or the Obama administration, even though many of the complaints had little or nothing to do with him.

Brennan tried to head off some of the complaints by saying in his opening statement that he’d learned there was a “trust deficit” between the CIA and the Senate. He called that “wholly unacceptable.”

“I like to think that my candor and bluntness will reassure you that you will get straight answers from me, maybe not always the ones you like but you will get answers and they will reflect my honest views,” he said.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) made clear that there was a lot of work to do after decades of directors she said misled her or obstructed her requests.

“With the exception of Mr. Panetta, I feel I’ve been jerked around by every CIA director,” Mikulski said, a list that would include not just Bush-era directors like Porter Goss and George Tenet but also perhaps Obama appointee David Petraeus.

If White House officials thought President Barack Obama’s belated decision Wednesday to allow intelligence committees access to classified Justice Department legal memos that justified drone strikes against American terror suspects abroad would appease the committee, that was clearly a miscalculation.

Instead, it seemed to have provoked them. Senators opened the session with a flurry of complaints. They challenged Brennan about why senators’ staff couldn’t look at the documents.

“Our staff was banned from seeing it … this is upsetting to a number of members,” an irritated Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) declared.